Todd Rose knows your private opinions

David Weigel: What’s the origin of this polling? Why’d you decide to do it?

Todd Rose: There’s a handful of methodologies that are really good at discovering when people aren’t telling the truth. They just hadn’t really been used at scale. So, we developed and refined those methods, and then started going after private opinion research. We’ve studied everything from what people mean by a successful life to what they want out of education. We saw the shift in what the public wants in K-12, about five years early because private opinion is always going to change before public opinion does.

We figured out two phenomena. One, people weren’t just self silencing. In a lot of cases, they were just outright lying about their views to really fit into the group. We found that literally every demographic is outright lying about multiple issues. The second thing that we found, which I actually wrote a book about, is this phenomenon called a collective illusion. When we ask people not only their private views but what you think most people would say to this, what we found over and over again is people are just spectacularly wrong about what most Americans think.

It’s funny. This is a phenomenon we’ve known about in research for at least 100 years, but it’s only been recently, because of social media, that it’s become a big problem, because the way your brain estimates group consensus is that it assumes the loudest voices repeated the most are the majority. You’ve got this with social media, where 80% of all content is created by 10% of the users, and they tend to be extreme on almost every issue.

What’s an example of that?

I actually went to Israel six weeks after the Oct. 7 attacks, because they had found that China was manipulating talk to drive antisemitic sentiment. Because people aren’t being honest about their views, the national discourse is being shaped by extremely vocal fringes that people are perceiving as majority views, and it leads to a lot of people conforming to stuff they don’t really agree with.

It seems pretty obvious that a free society doesn’t really function if we just can’t even say what we think, and we’re so wrong about each other. But we actually ended up predicting Trump’s final vote percentage in the popular mode within a half a percentage point six months in advance. It turned out that black and brown men and Gen Z weren’t telling the truth about their willingness to vote for him. There was no love for DEI, affirmative action at work — literally every demographic said, we want meritocracy. But at the same time, Americans still care a lot about diversity.

We have this data now that says nine out of 10 Americans think society’s unfair. Obviously, that begs the question: What’s unfair? We’re trying to dig into that. One of the single best predictors of a functioning free society is social trust, your willingness to trust people you don’t really know.

We’ve seen that plummeting. Nobody trusts the government. They don’t trust the media. Most importantly, they don’t trust each other. Only 38% of Americans believe most people can be trusted. That’s third world level.

How do you know that people are telling the truth when they admit that they’re low-trust or not sharing their real beliefs?

A year ago, there were similar levels of self silencing, and people were willing to admit it. Remember the talk of a vibe shift, and after Trump won, people could be more contrite? It turns out that people are still self-silencing, but they’re less willing to say that publicly. Our list experience is the same methodology that the IRS uses to estimate who cheats on their taxes. The only people who are willing to say yes to that are either in jail or don’t mind going to jail.

What have you found that was most revealing, that just isn’t picked up in other polls or media coverage?

That there’s a lot more pessimism than we even think about the economy. It’s unbelievable, in private, how much more pessimistic people are. People were overwhelmingly overstating their support for DOGE. Everyone thinks the waste and stuff is bad, but when you ask about DOGE, real support was 10% lower than initial support. There’s less and less private support to completely dismantle DEI. Every single demographic is outright lying about multiple issues.

There’s a book called “The Guns of August,” by Barbara Tuchman, about World War I. Her thesis was that the technology for war had changed exponentially, but the mindset had not, and that was why the fighting was so bloody. I believe something similar has happened now in terms of propaganda and manipulation. When people or bots spread lies, they are able to manipulate a false consensus. And the groups that are the most sensitive to these collective illusions are young people — which isn’t that surprising, because they really want to fit in — and CEOs, because they care about what their customers think.

Remember the “say no to drugs” campaign, back in the day? The problem with it was that they assumed the reason kids were trying drugs was because they were curious about drugs. The private opinion data showed that this was wrong. They were skeptical about drugs. They wanted to fit in, and they were under this massive collective illusion where they thought most American teens did drugs. You blitz them like a billion dollars of ads trying to scare them straight, and what they took from it was — wow, everyone must be doing this, because why else would adults try so hard to get us to stop?